


the heavens hum a stun-gun lullaby

by twilightstargazer



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Grounder Bellamy Blake, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 06:48:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14764662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twilightstargazer/pseuds/twilightstargazer
Summary: He hesitates long enough that he worries the ink has started to dry before he steels himself, taking a deep breath and bringing the pen down.In the end he settles for a simple ‘Hello?’, the ink bleeding across the creases in his wrist and then he waits for a response.It doesn’t take long for a ‘hi’ to appear below his greeting and he can feel a weight roll of his shoulders.He has asoulmate.





	the heavens hum a stun-gun lullaby

**Author's Note:**

> BFF fill for the prompt: Canonverse Soulmate AU where whatever you draw on your skin shows up at the exact same time on your soulmate's skin but with Grounder!Bellamy.

**B E L L A M Y**

 

He’s eight when the first bits of colour appear on his skin, splotches of dull red and blue and yellow staining his fingertips and slowly creeping up the length of his fingers.

It’s a shock to say the least, and he drops the book he was reading out of fear of dirtying the pages.

The colours move further down his fingers and across his palms, mixing and swirling of their own accord and he can do nothing but sit and stare. He tries to smudge it with his fingers, but when that doesn’t work he tries to rub it off in the stream behind his house.

Eventually, after half hour, it disappears as it came, slowly fading from wrist to tip as though it was washing off by itself.

Bellamy tells his mother about it at dinner and she immediately shushes him.

It isn’t until they’re back in the cabin, shrouded in darkness, does she turn to him and say, “Never speak of this to anyone again.”

“But-” he tries to protest, only to be interrupted.

“It’s dangerous. Soulmates are used as bargaining chips in war and I will not have you end up like that. Do you understand?”

He bows his head. “Yes mother.”

“Good.” She squeezes his shoulders. “Don’t let anyone know. Not even your sister. I’ll help you hide it for as long as I can.”

Two days later he finds a pair of dark leather gloves on his pillow and a week after that he’s enrolled in the scouting programme.

It’s for the best his mother says. To be a scout is to be alone, spending weeks, sometimes even months among the trees. It reduces his risk of being found out if he stays in the village and that reduces the risk of anything bad happening to his family. He might not get to see them as often anymore but he’d take that over anything happening to his mother, his  _ sister _ , any day.

Soulmates aren’t abnormal per say, but they’re not exactly a dime a dozen either. He’s read about them in books of course, two people so powerful together, completely and wholly meant for each other that even the gods were afraid of them, prompting Zeus to split them up.

Lately it’s been used tactic by warring tribes, a single death that can spin a fight in anyone’s favour.

His mother was right in making him hide it.

From then on the marks on his hands are a normal thing. More often than not they’re smudged black and grey from charcoal, the dark stain becoming a permanent part of him at this point, though sometimes it’s accompanied by doodles. Pinprick stars, microscopic flowers, ocean waves; they’re all drawn on the back of his right hand, a new one everyday that’s there when he falls asleep, only to be replaced by a new one when he wakes up.

Bellamy takes care to never be seen without his gloves on, and to never do anything that could possibly send a message to his soulmate.

He’s sixteen when the words to start to appear though, scrawling cursive on the inside of his wrist.

The drawings are still there, but sometimes, at least once a week it’s replaced by a word. There’s no rhyme or reason to them, and while he knows some from perusing the yellowing pages of the books back in his village, the majority are just as foreign to him as the person writing them.

He starts keeping record of them in a pocket book, each time a new word appears so he could look it up whenever he heads back to the village.

As he grows so do the marks on his skin.

He’s seventeen when a rope of ivy is drawn on his forearm, nineteen when he wakes to a wreath of laurels around his wrist, twenty-one when he has a full verse from a Keats poem bleeding into his palm.

By the time he’s twenty-two he has at least three journals full of random words and drawings that, try as he might, he’s never able to replicate with the elegance of the person who drew it.

He’s gotten so used to it that when he wakes up one morning only to find a faded version of yesterday’s daisies and roses, he panics.

It takes him a good ten minutes to calm down, trying to reassure himself. Maybe they’ve just been busy. Maybe they couldn’t find any ink. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

(His stomach is churning from all the anxiety and he can only bring himself to eat a single slice of stale bread.)

He never wrote back to them out of fear of getting attached and the pain that comes with it and here he is now. Attached all along.

He’s such a fool.

Three days pass and the only sign that the drawings were ever there is a dark smudge by his thumb, a remnant of a daisy.

He’s a pale and anxious mess, so much so that it prompts his scouting partner to ask, “You okay?”

“Fine,” he grunts, gritting his teeth. “Think I ate some bad berries. It’ll pass.”

He seems to accept it and Bellamy leaves no room for any more questions by pulling himself up by the nearest tree branch.

That’s the down side of scouting. Nothing ever fucking happens which leaves him with plenty of down time to think of reasons why he’s yet to get a response, each more horrific than the next.

They’re not dead. Surely he would have felt something if they were.

It’s safe to say that he may be spiralling just a little.

Three more days go by and the last bits of the drawing fade from his skin, taking a piece of him with it. He doesn’t know anything about who or what or why and it’s driving him insane.

A full week has passed since the last drawing appeared on his skin and it’s still instinctual for him to look down at his hands as soon as he gets up in the morning. He braces himself to see nothing but tan skin and raised scars but at the last second he spots it.

His fingertips are stained black.

Bellamy almost whoops with joy, scrambling to investigate further.

There still are no new drawings on his arms but the tips of his fingers are dark and sooty looking, like whoever it is dipped their hand in ash.

It still doesn’t offer any answers as to what happened, why they disappeared, but they’re alive and he finds himself smiling for the rest of the day.

Of course, his luck doesn’t hold out for too long because that evening a rider is sent to their campsite bearing bad news.

They ride through the entire night, and Bellamy bursts through the doors of the medbay covered in dew and sweat.

“Where is she?” he asks, frantic, eyes darting left to right.

The healer takes him to the cot where his mother lies, unmoving except for the shallow rise and fall of her chest.

“There’s nothing more we can do,” he says, placing a hand on Bellamy’s shoulder as his knees buckle and he falls back on to a stool. 

He closes his eyes, swallowing heavily. “And my sister?” he rasps, “Where is she?”

“Training. She’s at least a week’s ride from here. There was no time.”

Another shudder runs through him. “Can you still-”

“We sent our fastest rider.”

“Good. Thank you.”

The healer gives his shoulder one last squeeze before wandering off to tend to the other patients. Bellamy takes his mother’s hand in his, cold to the touch and sits with her, murmuring the stories she once told him as a child as her breaths become further spaced.

She takes her last breath at dawn, just as the sunlight begins to creep through the windows.

The funeral is held the same day. It will take Octavia at least a week to get here and he doesn’t see any sense in waiting, prolonging his mourning.

Bellamy does not cry when the pyre is lit, he does not cry when his mother’s corpse is engulfed in flames or when someone hands him a clay pot with her ashes hours later.

It is only when he returns to their cabin at dusk- his cabin now- does he finally shed a tear. The place felt so small when he was growing up, filled with him and his sister and his mother, but now it feels almost a large as the gaping hole in his heart.

It hits him hard when he realises that he’s alone now.

Sure he has Octavia but she’s not going to be here anytime soon, not now when he’s at his most vulnerable, his most helpless.

He hangs his head and another tear slips out, landing on his fingertips.

Which are still stained black.

For a second, time seems to freeze.

His mother had warned him about soulmates, about letting someone, anyone, know of the existence of his and when she died, the secret died with her.

But now… now when he’s like this, just searching for the comfort of another human being who better to turn to than his soulmate. Surely they’d understand.

There’s a pot of ink on the shelf by his mother’s sewing area and he carefully uncaps it, dipping the nib into the pot and bringing it to his arm before stopping.

He feels nervous about it for some reason. After twenty two years of hiding it, here he is, about to make himself known to whoever is on the other side, his  _ soulmate _ .

He hesitates long enough that he worries the ink has started to dry before he steels himself, taking a deep breath and bringing the pen down.

In the end he settles for a simple ‘ _ Hello?’, _ the ink bleeding across the creases in his wrist and then he waits for a response.

It doesn’t take long for a  _ ‘hi’ _ to appear below his greeting and he can feel a weight roll of his shoulders.

He has a  _ soulmate _ .

He knew it of course, has known it for the past fourteen years, but it’s the first time that it’s ever felt this  _ real _ , that it’s not the universe playing some huge cosmic joke on him.

His soulmate’s handwriting is much neater than his chicken scratch and ordinarily he would feel embarrassed but right now he’s far too giddy to pay it much attention.

Another message appears underneath the first, reading  _ wow, you certainly took your time _ , and they’ve even added a little flourish on the y.

_ I was kind of freaked out by the whole thing _ , he writes back, accidentally smudging the words in his haste.

_ So why now? _

It stops him in his tracks and he feels a wave of guilt crash over him. He wonders if they’ve been waiting for the past fourteen years for him to reply, hoping one day they’ll find a doodle of their own next to the intricate works of art they create every day. He knew that they existed, that he was never truly alone but they didn’t. They would have thought that they had no one. That they were all alone in this world.

_ I’m sorry. _

_ That’s not a reason. _

Bellamy bites back a smile. He can almost feel the attitude dripping off of the words and he ducks his head.

He hesitates for a second before he scrawls out  _ my mother died today _ on the back of his palm.

The response is instantaneous.

_ My dad was killed about a week ago _ , they write out followed by a quick,  _ the universe sure has a fucked up sense of humour _ .

It actually makes him snort and Bellamy finds himself lighting a candle to illuminate the room.

_ I’m Bellamy _ he writes in the crook of his elbow.

He watches as the words _ nice to finally meet you Bellamy _ appear on the outside of his forearm followed by a  _ my name is Clarke _ underneath it accompanied by a cluster of stars.

He falls asleep hunched over the table and wakes up with a crick in his neck and his arms covered in smudges of black and blue from talking with Clarke all night. He wipes it off with a damp washcloth but the streaks of black and grey remain, a reminder that Clarke is with him wherever he goes.

It’s a nice feeling to have he has to admit.

From then on most nights are spent talking to Clarke, scrawling over any bits of skin they can reach. Bellamy retires from scouting and becomes a bookkeeper for the village, owning an archive of sorts where he rewrites old stories and lessons passed on from generation to generation. It allows him to have a near endless supply of ink and he only feels slightly guilty for using it to talk to Clarke all the time.

He learns her in bits and pieces and while he could write a book of things she’s told him (he actually  _ does  _ write a book about it, keeping records of everything in the same journals he used to write down the words he scrawled across their hands) the most shocking bit he’s learnt is that she’s from space.

As in hundreds of miles above him, circling the earth in a giant metal box,  _ space _ .

Yeah, he was a bit overwhelmed when he found out.

Just like she was when he told her that he lived on the ground.

They stayed up all night trading questions and Bellamy wakes to a smudge of ink on his cheek the next morning.

There’s also a drawing of the moon and stars overlooking a thick forest on his ribs, and for some reason it makes him blush as he pulls on a clean shirt.

Octavia is back in the village, staying with him for a while after they emptied their mother’s ashes in the stream.

It’s harder to hide the marks from his sister, especially because she has no concept of personal space and barges into his room without knocking all the time.

Clarke thinks it’s funny, but Clarke also doesn’t understand the danger of soulmates down here.

He’s tried to explain but it’s not that easy writing it out on his body.

Of course, it’s only a matter of time that his sister finds out, and it happens in the stupidest way possible.

Although Clarke thinks that he is over exaggerating the dangers of having a soulmate, she does wipe off evidence of their late night chats from his arms.

What she’s taken to doing during the day however is drawing little pieces on his ribs and stomach and chest.

He never tells her how much it makes him blush when he finds them, especially when her drawings extend over his heart. There’s just something so much more intimate about doing that when compared to trading notes over hands and wrists.

This is exactly what Octavia sees when she barges in on him one day while he’s changing his shirt; a bird drawn on the side of his ribs and they both freeze in their tracks.

“Since when do you have a tattoo?” she asks, wrinkling her nose. “And why is it so lame?”

Bellamy’s never been a good liar, especially to his sister so when he doesn’t come up with a response to her question within the next few seconds, she narrows her eyes and glares at him.

“Seriously?” she snaps, letting the door fall shut behind her. “And you didn’t tell me?”

“I didn’t think it was your place to know.”

“I think it’s my place to know when my brother is being a dumbass!”

“It’s none of your business Octavia,” he says firmly, pulling a shirt on over his head.

“How long?” she asks, and it causes him to still.

“Since I was eight. Mom knew. I only started to talk to them recently though,” he says softly, still turned away from her. His fingers ghost over the drawing of their own accord.

“So you only started being a fool recently,” she hisses and Bellamy sighs.

“Nothing is going to happen to me,” he says firmly. “No one will ever find her to hurt me.”

She snorts. “You don’t know that.”

His lips quirk up in a wry smile. “I do actually.” He turns around to face her properly. “Clarke’s ah… not from around her. Or anywhere close to here.”

Octavia merely lifts an eyebrow and he sighs.

“She’s from space.”

“Oh, bull _ shit _ .”

It takes him almost an entire hour to convince his sister that Clarke is actually from space, including a message from Clarke herself about it, and even then he’s still not sure Octavia believes him.

After she leaves, he finds a grumpy looking stick figure on the back of his hand labelled ‘Bellamy.’ There’s another one next to it, shorter, that’s pointing and laughing at it labelled ‘Clarke.’

He finds his pen and scrawls out a hasty  _ shut up Clarke _ beneath it to which she responds with  _ make me _ .

The thing is, Bellamy knows what being soulmates mean. Sure, platonic soulmates aren’t unheard of, but he knows that whatever he and Clarke have, it’s not that.

Platonic soulmates don’t get butterflies in their stomach when they wake to find  _ have a good day! _ scribbled across their torsos. Their hearts don’t flip whenever they find a drawing of the sun originating from the centre of their sternum. They don’t feel a shock of heat when it’s late at night and a couple lines appear on their hip bone.

Bellamy doesn’t want to call it love but even he knows that whatever this is definitely has the potential to go there.

But he likes her.

He really, really likes her, his soulmate, who doesn’t even live on earth.

It's been just over a month since he's started talking to Clarke. A single month and during that time they’ve spoken every single night, writing messages back and forth all over their bodies for the other one to read.

He wakes and finds Cerberus drawn on his forearm and smiles.

It might not be love, not yet at least, but it’s getting there soon.

-

He’s drunk when Clarke tells him that she’s in prison for the first time, drunk when she tells him that she’s probably going to be dead in the next three months, drunk when he finally realizes that he might actually love her.

He thinks back to the first time they wrote to each other.

The universe sure has a fucked up sense of humour, she had said and in this moment he can’t agree more.

_ Why didn’t you tell me before? _

_ I didn’t want you to worry _

He supposes that that’s a fair excuse, but he still can’t help but be mad. Before he found out that their… whatever this is had a ticking time bomb attached to it, Bellamy knew that his chances of ever seeing Clarke in real life were slim to none. If she dies up in space, it wouldn’t change anything. They would have never gotten more than this, hidden messages in the dead of night, never to see or touch or hold each other in their lives.

But at least even then they’d have this, this strange messaging system just for the two of them and no one else.

If she dies, he goes back to being alone, to having no one, not even phantom hands that got stained by charcoal or drawn on in ink.

_ Are you okay?  _ she writes when he doesn’t reply after some time.

_ I will be. _

He can tell that she’s trying to find the words to say something from the way several smudges appear on his legs, like inkblots.

Eventually, after some time, the words appear.

_ The very first time you wrote to me I had been looked up in solitary for a week and I thought I was going insane. I had been given a death sentence and I was ready to wallow in it for the next four months but then you came along and I never needed to wallow. _

He rereads the words probably ten times, getting choked up. Clarke all but confesses that he’s the reason for her to keep going but right now all he can manage to say in response to that is  _ I’m glad _ .

A heart appears on the inside of his thumb and he smiles down at it before drawing one of his own to match.

It’s only later when he’s getting ready for bed, far after she’s fallen asleep does he find the words she wrote on his chest, directly above his heart.

_ You’ll always have me in here. _

-

Bellamy tries his best to ignore the deadline set on their relationship, but try as he might, he can’t forget the fact that each passing day brings him closer to the day he’ll have to say goodbye to her forever.

Clarke, for her part, seems to be normal, so he tries to take his cues from her.

She’s cracking jokes and hiding lewd drawings under his armpit as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening. Meanwhile Bellamy is constantly on the verge of crying, yelling and violently punching something in the face all at the same time.

But for her sake he tries to keep it together.

If they only have two more months left and she wants to spend it talking about the kind of berries available in his area then he’s more than happy to oblige her.

He still hasn’t told her that he loves her as of yet, although by now it must be pretty obvious.

In his defense, neither has she, but he’s also not drawing her gifts every morning before she gets up so maybe he really is lagging behind right now.

It’s the end of one of summer’s last days and he pulls his jacket tight around him as he trudges back home.

At this point, it’s customary for Clarke to write little things about how her day is going across his arms and legs but now, as he peels off his jacket and shirt, he finds his arms covered in his name, written over and over at least a hundred times.

And then he spots it, there in the middle of it all encompassed within a thick, dark bubble she wrote:

_ I’m coming to the ground _

The world comes to a screeching halt.

He’s not quite sure how long he spends looking at it, trying to process the words but when he can finally breathe, he grabs the nearest pot of ink he can find and dips his pen in it.

Bellamy’s not sure what’s the procedure of coming down to earth from a spaceship is like, he isn’t sure how long it will take or if Clarke would even be able to see his message but nonetheless he writes it out big and bold on the back of his hand,  _ I won’t take my eyes off the sky. _

And then, just because the adrenaline is still pumping and his heart is pounding a staccato beat within its cage, he rolls down his pants and writes the tiniest of  _ I love you’ _ s behind his knee.

Just because.

 

* * *

**C L A R K E**

 

It takes maybe three hours after they’ve crash landed on earth for people to start dropping out of trees, and Clarke doesn’t quite scream but it’s a close call.

Six months ago if someone were to ask her, she would have said that the ground was a problem for the generations after her to solve, that soulmates don’t exist and that the Ark would be sustainable for the next fifty years or so.

And now here she is on the ground looking at the strangers who fell out of the trees in hopes that one might be her grounder soulmate.

A lot has definitely happened.

There are only six of them but she’s more than certain that if it came to a fight they could take them down without even breaking a sweat.

One by one they take off their masks and she’s only slightly disappointed that none of them look familiar.

Not that she knows what exactly Bellamy looks like but she’s hoping the whole soulmate thing might make it a bit easier. Maybe have him appear to her in a ray of golden light or something.

She takes charge, inevitably, and is only mildly irritated when Wells chooses to act as her co-leader or whatever.

It’s a two hour trek from the site of the dropship landing to the village and Clarke grows antsier by the minute.

The feeling disappears when they finally get there however, because she locks eyes with a man standing at the front of the crowd and  _ oh. _

It’s almost electrifying, and when she shoots him a shy smile and lifts her right hand, the faded smudge of a bird he tried to draw there last night still lingering, he does the same, and suddenly it’s like nothing else matters.

She vaguely hears Wells call after her as she breaks off from the group, saying something about meeting their leader and having peace talks. Whatever. She’s sure he can handle it. Wells is nothing but a pacifist.

Clarke is all but ready to throw her arms around his shoulders and cling to him for the next three hours but Bellamy stops her with a shake of his head. They’re not supposed to know each other, and running up to a complete stranger and hugging them is the complete opposite of that.

So she waits until all the attention is on the rest of the group before she can finally sneak away, and follows him up to a little cabin on the hill, letting the door fall shut behind them.

It’s completely dark except for the singular candle burning in the kitchen but she doesn’t care when Bellamy is finally standing in front of her.

She’s dreamt of this moment countless times and can’t help but let her eyes drink him in greedily.

He’s shorter than she would have thought, just a couple inches taller than her, but he makes up for it in width, all broad shoulders and chest and thick arms that she can’t help but linger on for too long. He has freckles splayed across his nose and cheekbones and an unruly mop of dark hair, almost as dark as his eyes that seem to be doing the same as her, roving over his form and trying to catalogue everything to memory.

Finally, she takes a step forward.

“Bellamy,” she says, and it’s the first time she’s ever said his name out loud.

She wants to say it again and again and again.

He flashes a wide grin at her, blinding her for a second.

“Clarke,” he breathes, eyes still flickering over her face, “You’re  _ real _ . You’re actually  _ here _ .”

That’s all it takes for her to run to him, flinging herself against him in a hug as a small sob escapes her.

She never thought she’d be here, in this position, but here she is burying her face into the crook of her soulmate’s neck and breathing him in, the scent of trees and musk and sweat and just  _ earth  _ in general. It makes her shed a few tears.

“I’m here,” she whispers, clutching him tighter. “I’m finally here.”

-

Life on earth isn’t as difficult as she thought it would be.

Obviously it takes them a couple of days to adapt to the new environment, the food, everything, but all in all, life on earth is already leagues better than life on the Ark.

She shares a cabin with Bellamy, who lives alone and has a second bedroom to spare.

Nothing much has happened between them. They still have late night talks together, where they chat about anything and everything, except now instead of struggling to find space on their bodies to fit in a word or two, they can actually talk to each other until their voices go gravelly and hoarse.

They talk about everything: their days, a book he’s read, a movie she’s seen, life before.

“How come you kept drawing when I never drew back?” he asks one night while they’re lying in bed together. It’s getting colder and Bellamy’s bed is bigger and has a hearth in it. It’s only  _ practical  _ for them to share a bed together.

(And if she likes snuggling up against his chest to sleep at night well, sue her.)

The question causes her cheeks to flush and she ducks her head so as not to look at him.

“It’s actually kind of funny,” she starts, twisting the blanket around her thumb. “I never really believed in the whole soulmate thing so when we were eight, Wells and I decided that we were so good at being best friends that we should be soulmates. Whatever I drew for him, I drew for me.”

Bellamy hums low in his throat and continues to pet her hair. “What changed?”

She pulls the blanket so tight around her thumb that it starts to turn purple. “My dad died,” she says, “Or rather, he was executed for treason. Wells and my mom were the only ones who knew what he’d found. I thought-” she stops herself, looking down as tears blur her eyes.

He drops a kiss on the crown of her head and tugs her closer.

“Anyway,” she sniffs after a few minutes, “I went to prison because I knew about it too. I blamed Wells and the fact that I couldn’t see him again meant no more fake soulmarks.”

“Until I wrote to you.”

“Until you did,” she says and he kisses her forehead again.

Living with him is like always teetering on the precipice of something more.

She learns his quirks and he learns hers. It different now than before. Before they could only rely on what the person had told them but now they get to see it and learn about it instead. Like how he told her that he likes to read. Sure, she knew that, but now she knows that when he’s concentrating he gets a furrow between his brows and he likes to have a cup of tea with his book before bed.

Autumn flows into winter and things are still going good.

She makes up with Wells, she becomes part of the team working in the medbay, and Octavia only hates her half the amount as she did when they first met.

Bellamy still writes her little messages from time to time. Just variations of ‘have a good day’ and ‘make sure to eat’ but it still leaves a smile on her face. He already imposed on her what might happen if anyone finds out about it, but let her tell Wells nonetheless.

The first time they kiss, it’s during the first snowfall of the season, the first snowfall for Clarke ever.

They’re both still in bed, cuddled under piles of blankets he leans over and tentatively kisses her, soft and slow and gentle and it feels like the entire world lets out a breath.

“Hi,” he says, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

Clarke can’t stop smiling, nuzzling his cheek with her nose. “Hey.”

He drops another kiss on the tip of her nose. “So I don’t know if you know this, but I kind of like you.”

“I kind of like you too,” she giggles, and then shrieks when he suddenly tugs her down on top of him, kissing her again, this time wetter and deeper than before.

Later, when she rolls up her sleeves to wash her hands in the medbay, she sees it, dark blue ink scrawled across her wrist.

_ I am also in love with you, Clarke Griffin. Completely and irrevocably so. _

She smiles to herself, and lets her hand trace the letters of his words before grabbing a pot of ink and slinking off to the corner.

She’s thought it thousands of times, even had to bite it back sometimes, but she still can’t help the giddy tremble of her fingers as she writes out her own message to him, right beneath his.

_ I love you too, Bellamy Blake. With all my heart. _

 


End file.
